Good day! I'm searching on how to enable auto-completion for command in Rebol 3 with Windows 7. It works with Rebol 2. I did tried to search it on the web, but couldn't find any. I search the chat room here neither did I.

@YuShen Heya! Welcome back. The console in Rebol 3 is notoriously unfinished. Obviously from a programming API level, standard I/O (stdin, stdout) is like a teletype and features like cursor positioning are not available unless you link to something more platform specific.

@YuShen There exists the Curses library but Rebol is as lean and mean as it is because it has been very careful about picking up dependencies on libraries like that. So getting console functionality has to be done judiciously. If you make a bad library choice, Rebol's size could double... triple... fast!

@YuShen Because of Rebol's new "host kit" design, a different console which was tailored to Windows can be written for the windows build using the Windows Console API... and for any particular build the host could be very specific, so no binary is any bigger than it needs to be. It's a harder road than using an abstraction layer, but Rebol does not like to compromise on this.

@ZawLin Ah, quick tips. You can edit your posts for two minutes, to edit the last push the up arrow key. To edit another, hover and you'll get a drop down menu on the left with a downward pointing triangle.

I have another problem that I wish Rebol could help to solve: Is it possible to hook up a Rebol script to process some emails. The environment is on Windows 7, my email is Outlook Exchange 2007. My purpose is to automate some report generation through email interface.

@ZawLin Rebol and Red are great but I wouldn't call embedding them particularly easy just yet (it will be). From what I've seen QtScript is fairly serviceable for one's average needs, and fits into a framework I think is well designed overall.

@YuShen @GrahamChiu has done a bit with things like connecting to Gmail, I believe. I don't offhand know about an Exchange Server interface.

@syntax Welcome to StackOverflow. Check the Markdown FAQ, multiline code formatting is done with spacing (four spaces) not backticks. I'm reading your questions, fixing them, and as you seem like not spam upvoting appropriately so you can chat... just making sure. :-)

@earl @DocKimbel Carl likes tabs and is swayed by supporting arguments, even @onetom's argument, which I don't really believe matters myself. I don't care. I just want a standard. Spaces seems better these days with the web, but I just want a pre-commit script enforcing a standard. Is there any chance we can agree on this between Rebol and Red?

So the console thing keeps coming up. I don't do a whole lot of console programming, I'd rather write a file and use a decent editor, and most of the console stuff I do is with @RebolBot

But it is clearly a big issue. As is HTTPS. Encap not so much, and people haven't exactly been clamoring for full stack source to the Android build. I could put that together pretty quickly if I felt like it. Should I? Because I do C/C++ my only Android stuff so far have been built from the "Hello World" of NDK because I don't see the point of writing mobile apps without access to the hardware and doing something that any moron with an Eclipse and Java install can't do.

; Brought to you by: tryrebol.esperconsultancy.nl
>> help -of
Found these related words:
body-of function! Returns a copy of the body of a function, obj...
lib object! [end! unset! none! logic! integer! decimal! p...
map-gob-offset native! Translates a gob and offset to the deepest go...
maximum-of function! Finds the largest value in a series
minimum-of function! Finds the smallest value in a series
spec-of function! Returns a copy of the spec of a function or m...

I am distracted, and life is complex, and trying to be pound-wise and not penny-foolish I'm not sure if the best way to spend my time is going after this. We can't all be @Ladislav. Speaking of which, @Ladislav, we kind of need a guidance document covering things because we don't get it.

@Brett "There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know." -- Donald Rumsfeld

When you use words in a script - every command line you enter interactively is a different script - those words are added to system/contexts/user, the user context. Simply having the words in the script at all gets them added to the user context, that is all the "use" that is needed. If any of th...

There isn't really a summary somewhere, so let's go over the basics, perhaps a little more informally than Bindology. Let Ladislav write a new version of his treatise for R3 and Red. We'll just go over the basic differences, in order of importance.
Object and Function Contexts
Here's the big di...

OK, this is going to be a little tricky.
In Rebol 3 there are no such things as system words, there are just words. Some words have been added to the runtime library lib, and set is one of those words, which happens to have a function assigned to it. Modules import words from lib, though what "i...

In Rebol 3 there is certain behavior of the console and scripts that is important to understand:
Anything you type is loaded by REBOL. When it is loaded, it is put in a context.
If I type:
b: 4
set 'b 5
There is an existing word b or 'b without any of the code/data being evaluated, which is...

In experimenting with words in Rebol 3, I ran into the following error.
>> set to-lit-word "g" 4
** Script error: 'g word is not bound to a context
** Where: set
** Near: set to-lit-word "g" 4
This seems pretty tricky because of the following results:
>> to-lit-word "g"
== 'g
>> set 'g 4
== 4...

@kealist Nice one. I think this is good to do, not only as institutional knowledge, but also because of the wiki-like nature where details can be corrected, and we can stop usages of things like REBOL in all caps in question titles and bodies. :-)

Also, when self-answering questions on my own, I find that about half the time someone else actually has a better answer than I thought I had.

(In C++, usually. There are some people here who know C++ really... really... crazy well.)

As with us being here in part because many work on Rebol language design questions etc, there are C++ standards committee members here too around a lot

When the time is right we need to edit the wikipedia page to say, like the Lisp page does: Rebol (historically REBOL) - is a computer language...

@earl I'm honestly confused on what your stance is on the question mark thing. Boolean results only? Not at all? Should length? be length-of or not? It is one of those things R3/Backward needs to be able to make a semi-irrelevant decision for legacy code, but we are getting to the point where these sorts of decisions need to be nailed down, and @DocKimbel's opinion matters here too.

I don't really like it as much, and I think it goes back to my feeling that "keywords" shouldn't have hyphens, because I use hyphens as a guide to call out variables and user functions... and while it might be argued that length-of is more literate, I don't like the hyphen.

So my drive that acted like it was dying and the OS refused to write to that had the Recode files on it at first (not memex, the other one) is acting like nothing is wrong now.

It never made any clicking noises, the OS just decided it didn't like it that second morning. Filesystem corruption? Was it just trying to threaten me? Now I have to decide whether to throw it away or not.

I guess I can just use it as an Nth backup of something and put it in the tire compartment of my car. If everything else dies, and it doesn't somehow, or if thieves break in and steal all my other drives, I might be thankful it's there.

Hey @Ladislav. Wondering if we have come to an understanding or not. It is difficult as we seem to hit linguistic barriers to realize I'm not vilifying Saphirion, but if @pekr is defending me, you know that it has to be a communication problem. :-)

And I have to decide how serious I want to be about an international job search, and if I do I'd be hired for one thing: the deep C/C++/asm experience. And I do really enjoy C and C++ but I've gotten very used to using it on my own projects, to my own interests... re-adapting to the nose to the grindstone "what the customer wants" is going to take a conscious decision to decide I care about that again.

I know Europe isn't perfect, but I haven't lived there, and I liked Spain

And I speak Spanish

If I could find a job in Madrid, I might take it.

I'd kind of rather live in Germany, but the whole "not speaking German" issue is a problem.

@kealist Well as you might have noticed I haven't submitted much in the way of pull requests to Rebol source, despite probably being one of the people in the best positions to do so.

I sort of want to build the culture, and promote complexity elimination, and chasing down random bugs in that codebase vs. sorting out the bigger picture would invest too much in Rebol when Red may be the better plan.

It's 90% the same, but the remaining 10% is big. I don't know if I want to run to security of a job. @DocKimbel has put a lot on the line, and I try to respond in kind.

I grew up a dyed-in-the-wool programmer, and I branched out to graphic design... video editing... foaming milk for coffee... I got interested in being less specific. And what draws me to Rebol is mostly related to what I would have liked about it as a kid, or what Doc calls "the fun".. indeed I started with Basic.

Sadly despite being the son of a programmer, I really didn't much beside HTML until I was in college. I did spend my childhood at Amiga conferences and played with Rebol before it was released. Just always been focused on other things more.

Just got back from my meeting with the forester regarding the unmanned aerial drone project. Started at 7am this morning, traveled to some forest lands about an hour away, did some hiking and a lot of discussing, and wrote up a proposal.

As the vision statement was laid out :-) the rebol.org domains would all have to be open source, community maintained from the get-go. No real rules on the rebol.net domains. U host it, u got it, if your project is reasonable-sounding. Sourcing it would be nice but not a requirement if it is inconvenient to document or replicate.

(The Fork Shaman went on a vision quest, and this is what the spirit guide said.)

(There was something also about my fifth grade teacher, and my teeth falling out, but let's disregard those bits.)

I mean... it's not so much that doing it right guarantees success. Success is a difficult and multifaceted thing. I'm just saying that there's no point in doing basic things wrong. Because then you never get to the actual thing you're trying to talk about.

It's always about the beer/wine. And cigars, apparently.

@graph I'm just glad that now we're hitting github's rebol/rebol and red/red accounts. That was pretty sneaky of Doc, to email about a dead Red account, and the GitHub people (programmers) looked at his work and were like "yeah, we'll cancel this account and give it to you, you deserve it".

A light acknowledgement of effort.

And renaming rebol from "rebol/r3" to "rebol/rebol" was something I'd asked for.

@graph Video editing is actually very involved. Editing that Red talk took a week of work. It's hard to explain to those who don't know what video editing involves... but you don't throw 2 hours of footage at an editor and "it just happens". Also, I've been relocated, and I sort of have to balance learning about the area with any plans for the future.

@graph I'd like to just see the basic foundations move forward here. We had a good weekend actually, if you didn't see the commits, but it felt like actual progress.

@graph She backed out of the move. So I am currently, post conference, staying with a friend in rural North Carolina. It's... rural. I describe the literal fact that I am surrounded by cornfields. But fast internet.

Anyway, the thing is, I try to prioritize my time, as I have more free time than most. And yes, I could live indefinitely in this Internet-enabled cornfield until I have a physical ailment.

But the reason I work on community and videos and such and urging the websites to improve is because I feel that's the missing link. Rebol already trounces other languages technologically. Fixing random bugs is great, but anyone (well, not anyone, but many people) can do that.

And I also really support the direction of Red. So it's hard. I have to decide if I want to go get a job or not, and if I do, I can't work here. I'd have to move.

Not because remote people can't do good work, but because there is a general culture or concept of "commitment", longer-term contracts, it's a promise and you live by your reputation on that. I don't make a lot of promises that last longer than a month, but if I ever do, I'll certainly keep it.

@graph Well I am asking to be billed it just hasn't happened yet. If I really wanted to live for free I could live with my parents. That's... not going to happen. :-)

Though I know a number of entrepreneurs actually, who have taken a year or so to develop a concept going back and living with their parents, and then have that taken off. It's apparently a more commonplace occurrence in the US than it was.

I'm all for practicality, but I think that's a line I don't really want to cross.

@graph Well you are younger, and I do understand that the "zeitgeist" as they'd say about entrepreneurialism is a much stronger thing than when I was a kid. When I was younger it was all about "hey, work hard and maybe someday this company will decide you're worthy and hire you". The people who were sort of ahead of that curve founded the Googles and Yahoos of the world, just slightly younger than I. I missed that wave.

While I can see it now tactically, it's not in my heart. I'm a fairly conventional bureaucrat and organizer with a technical edge who is kind of funny. :-)

I don't care about money, and I don't like thinking about it.

Breaking Bad is interesting. If you don't know the premise, a chemistry teacher with lung cancer who wants to provide a financial legacy for his family decides to "go bad" and becomes a really, really good crystal meth maker.

Nah related. The idea was that it sounds like "ah a girl or something" while .. PLOT TWIST I think I might have found a programming buddy lol. A former colleague, and we've started a little project together

but you said you couln't fully relate to this kind of stuff (startups and projects while living with parents), hard to accept since...you know how many programmers out there are hacks and not really able to see someting through from start to finish, let alone think of doing that outside their work....

@graph Well teach him/her Rebol and Red. It's useful, really. I still say not ready for prime time app delivery, but people use scripts in throwaway languages all the time and they're really... unpleasant. I gag when I see it.

PHP and Javascript and Perl inevitably is terrible. Python and Ruby is... eh... well, it can be done in a semi-literate way for solving problems... but... we're sort of on the leading edge of literacy in software here.

@graph Well in the cultural narrative there are these ideas of Zen masters, people who draw intricate things with sticks in the sand to be wiped away by the tides... the point isn't about the work, it's about what your mind practices.

turns out all those little projects you start are useful for something, and 3x so if they end up as working, functional code. Plus the learning experience, never underestimate anything you gain after a few hours confusion

@graph Starring any quote of that. Because, I've done a lot of work on it, and even the head of Cloud Foundry at VMWare liked it and was willing to put it on their homepage... I could have pushed more. But I have a lot of projects, and node.js turned out to be kind of annoying.

Well let us say you are trying to sell a niche product like Kombucha Tea in rural United States. You can have the best graphic design, the best cost propositions, but then there is "educating the market". They don't know why they would or not want your product.

People are not educated enough to demand digital rights, of any kind, in general.

oh but there are strong expectations in place, that not everything I ever say or do should be aggregated and taken out of context. That more informaion about me is used by people, than I know about myself. Such stuff is obvious, it's just that things are happening to fast and invisible so people don't know what to do

there is little social interaction. People are individualized, don't know the names of their neighbors, are consumerist and stand in line for vain products instead of ...discuss political topics. THings like facebook, google, reveal their true consequence after you've signed up, and you can't really opt out anyway out of many things. Sooooooooooooooooooooo

Well remember the directive: "thou shalt not worship graven images". All pictures of glaring forks are not equal. And I don't have the time or interest to survey any theft of reputation. It's kind of a free for all in these parts.

Funny you'd bring it up. Most of my passwords can be reverse engineered, deliberately from the formulation of the security questions, and I monitor access attempts.... or not if I don't care. Even the scientist in Wargames made his password "Joshua" to try and stop people from launching nuclear weapons.

so you're one of the people who..post quite a few links. That other people follow. You use words...that other people pick up after being in contact with you. Automatically, your influence in society can be measured. Right? The influence of everyone in society can be measured. Maybe it turns out it's just a few 1000 people who do stuff. Just a few websites/groups who don't knwo that they initiate many things. Good stuff to know, huh?

It's not about your password and your harddisk. It's about meta-data, traffic